The Landscape of CBOs in Low-Income Neighborhoods: Resident Perceptions, Organizational Realities

Background:   Various forms of participatory democracy have been on the rise since 1970. One central purpose of such processes is to ameliorate political inequality and systemic under-representation of the poor in the American political system. Leaders of community-based organizations (CBOs), including social service providers, are often asked to represent “the community” in these participatory processes, yet there is very little ground level evidence about how residents perceive this representation, or whether they understand it to be happening at all. This project contributes to the social work knowledge base on the role of CBOs in providing more political voice for the poor through the following research questions: (1) To what extent are community residents aware of CBOs working on community problems? (2) Do nonprofits in low-income neighborhoods have sufficient capacity to serve as representatives? (3) For those that have the capacity, to what degree are they involved in representational tasks? (4) Is there a special concentration of low and high capacity CBOs, and is this distribution associated with residents’ views about CBO representation?

Methods: A mixed-methods approach is used drawing on multiple resident and organization-level data sources in three primarily African-American low-income neighborhoods on the Southside of Chicago where political exclusion is high. To obtain information about residents we draw from two data sources: a representative telephone survey (n=155) and in-depth qualitative interviews with 14 residents. To obtain information about organizations data which provides a census of all non-residential organizations in the communities of interest and 105 in-person interviews with directors of CBOs in each community. Each dataset is analyzed separately to answer questions #1-3 above, and GIS is used to conduct a geospatial distribution of CBOs by capacity, and this is statistically compared to the views and spatial location of residents.

Results:  There is little awareness of CBOs period among residents much less their activity in participatory processes (63% of residents could not name a single local organization). While many CBOs have capacity and are active, nearly half (48%) have very low capacity making it difficult for them to be engaged as a community representative. Among the remaining fifty percent of organizations, social service organizations are more likely to be engaged in participatory processes as community representatives than religious congregations. One of the three communities had a high concentration of religious organizations and therefore much lower close proximity access to CBOs engaged in representational activities.

Conclusions:  These findings raises several important concerns and a puzzle. First, at least half of the CBOs in the vulnerable communities we studied, have very low capacity and are unable to represent community residents; second, there are important geographic concentrations of low capacity even in small geographic spaces which might exacerbate disenfranchisement; however, the puzzle is that even in geographic spaces with significant involvement of CBOs in participatory processes on behalf of community residents, residents themselves seem completely unaware of these activities.